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“I was asking what I thought were reasonable questions: Is the electronic classroom an improvement? Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teach
by mc32 4y ago
“I was asking what I thought were reasonable questions: Is the electronic classroom an improvement? Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teaches you is to go to the computer whenever you have a question, rather than relying on yourself. Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.”
The question is coming up yet again with current LLMs and other AI. The previous waves displaced some people but generally modernized by automation many manual processes. Will this wave or the next or the next one after that be the one that displaces the need to learn altogether such that we are totally dependent on the machine and find ourselves unable to proceed without it having lost our aptitude to lean? Of course there will be people who keep on learning because of momentum or because they have an affinity for the old ways, just as we have hose riders, despite modern transportation, but not enough to sustain the system were the future generation of AI to fail (for whatever catastrophic reason like solar blast, etc.)
- CliffStoll 4y agoOh, but your note resonates with me — we’ve slowly changed our what we expect of a learned person. Once, understanding was central. Increasingly, we mainly care about getting the right answer. Or, in the case of AI, something that looks and feels like the right answer.
- hypertexthero 4y agoThis and the Large Language Model AI stuff reminds me of Feynman’s experience teaching in Brazil: “After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant.” —http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education I hope curiosity, genuine understanding, and joy remain central for our species. Thank you for your wonderful work and inspiration, Mr. Stoll!
- beefield 4y agoYour comment made me think a future world where AI is powerful but capped to the limits of human knowledge. In that world AI makes almost all people (economically) worthless. The exception are the people who take the challenge and study, work and research to expand the human knowledge. Whether this is an utopia or dystopia, I guess depends on how the relationship of these two groups work out.